Representation of the girl child in the 21st century Children’s Literature.

Jyoti Kushwaha
Ph.D Research Scholar Department Of English, Bundelkhand University, Jhansi, (U.P.)-284128.
Her research interest lies in children’s literature and aspires to be a part of the world of
fascinating authors of children’s literature.
Email address: saudaamini@gmail.com. Phone: 09451076211.
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Children’s literature in the form of stories is as long as humans have had language. As we study
the changing history of children’s literature, we find that social, cultural, and political norms
have had an impact on the content of the stories. Through literature children can learn about their
own culture and cultures around the world. In every culture the body plays a central role in
identity development. Gender is as significant a factor in identity development as culture.

In the Indian literary tradition, classical Sanskrit literature is one of the earliest to describe
children and childhood. The child that we find in these descriptions is more of a wish fulfilment–
a couple’s or more often a father’s–longing for progeny that carries the lineage forward.
Literature thereby abounds in waxing lyrical about the joy of a father who realizes his dream of
parental happiness through his off-spring. The birth of a boy means an increase in the status of
the family and the dignity of the mother who gives birth to the son. But the birth of a girl child is
not appreciated like the birth of a boy, because son carries the family name ,and also he is the
one who is to do the rituals after the death of his parents which Indians believe is essential to get
‘moksha’ for the wandering soul, to free itself from earthly bonds. King Rama’s love for his two
sons Lava and Kusha and Prabhakarvardhan’s love for his son, Harsha, are beautifully rendered
in verses by Bhavabhuti and Banbhatta respectively. It is only in Kalidasa that we find any
mention of the love and affection of a father for his girl child in the depiction of sage Kanva’s
love for his daughter Shakuntala. The Bhakti movement, particularly the songs of Surdasa on
Krishna’s childhood and that of Tulsidasa on Rama’s childhood, portray a detailed description of
childhood, especially that of the male child. These verses provide a fertile ground for an
understanding of our culture that has traditionally valued boys more highly than girls. This
preference for a son when a child is born is as old as Indian society itself. This impression is
strengthened when one reads the ancient Indian children’s literature. Thus we see that in
traditional Indian children’s literature, girl characters were either absent or passive.

What are little girls made of, made of?

What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and all things nice,
That's what little girls are made of.

Such stereotypes of the girl child are seen in almost every aspect of life, which unconsciously
portrays the image, society has in mind of the girl child. The girl child in most of the
representations appears as the miniature version of a female who behaves according to the code
of conduct prescribed for the responsible adult woman. This transitional period is depicted as the
period of training where the girl child receives her lessons on how to become a very good wife
and a very good mother. However, over the past few decades, the status of the girl child has
changed mainly due to the legislative measures, social development, increasing educational
facilities and awareness through media. Feminist insights into society and literature led to the
scrutiny of the various situations encountered by girls in life.

Scholars of children’s literature have frequently discussed the connection between women
writers and children’s texts. In relation to Indian children’s literature overall, ‘[t]he majority of
Indian writers of children’s fiction are women, for reasons that undoubtedly have to do with their
putative understanding of the child “sensibility”. In traditional Indian society, grandmothers
played the role of oral storyteller; perhaps women writers are taking up this mantle in the
contemporary context. In contemporary Indian children’s literature, feminist ideology is
observable in the widespread presence of girl characters and the pursuit of gender equality, with
the result that ‘[s]tories where girls are central characters and initiate action are . . . a common
feature’. Middle-class girls play the central role in these texts. They are empowered and
progressive; imagined through the lens of liberal feminism, they act to expand or even reject
traditionally prescribed social roles for Indian girls by insisting that girls and boys are equally
valued members of society and deserve equal opportunities, particularly in relation to education
and self-determination. Rejecting prescriptive traditional constructions of girls as passive,
dependent, restricted to the domestic sphere, and less valuable than boys, contemporary Indian
women writers both celebrate girls and imagine girlhood as an empowered state by positioning
girls as central to the narrative and by positioning girls and women as part of powerful
interconnected webs of family and community relationships. These girl characters unanimously
succeed in achieving transformation by acting with agency to improve their own lives, the lives
of people about whom they care, and/or the well-being of their communities. However, new
social roles for Indian girls are also prescriptive, simply with different parameters. Women
writers imagine non-traditional ways of being for their girl characters—ways that position
Gender equality as their foundation. In doing so, they create a ‘new Indian girl’ character that is
present in the majority of contemporary, English-language Indian children’s novels written by
women.

In this paper I will analyse Kashmira Seth’s Keeping Corner, Radha Padmnabhan and Viky
Arya’s Suchitra and the Ragpicker and Mrinal Pande’s Daughter’s Daughter, to demonstrate
how successfully they have positioned the new Indian girl as a valuable member of the Indian
society. New Indian girl characters are shaped by liberal feminist ideals and successfully balance
tradition and modernity: they honour tradition by working from within and improving family and
community relationships; at the same time they embrace modernity in their fight for gender
equality, which they attain by developing themselves through education and by making valuable
contributions to society, outside of the domestic sphere. New Indian girls work to overcome
restriction in search of empowerment—they are the new India.

Kashmira Sheth’s Keeping Corner provides a particularly clear example of this approach in that
it refutes the traditional belief that girls belong to the household by addressing an extreme of this
scenario: the case of Brahmin child widows in pre-Independence India. The protagonist Leela is
compelled by traditional doctrine to ‘keep corner’ by remaining inside her home for a year after
she is widowed at the age of twelve. Even after the year ends, her subsequent life, as dictated by
tradition, will remain a segregated subsistence: she will be a social outcast and considered a
burden on her family. But Sheth imagines a positive resolution for Leela, who refuses to be
constrained by traditional social restrictions on Hindu widows and protests against this unfair
treatment. Instead of remaining housebound and dependent, Leela completes her education,
supports herself by becoming a teacher, and influences others to see girls as capable of providing
valuable contributions to society. She later becomes active in Gandhi’s freedom movement. She
is the epitome of the new Indian girl. Forced by her relatives to behave according to strict Hindu
behavioural codes, newly widowed Leela begins to consider traditional patriarchal Hindu
customs and roles for women from a logical and moral perspective informed by liberalism. As a
new Indian girl, Leela begins to question tradition and subsequently rejects it after wondering,
‘[w]ho started this? And why? Can anyone benefit from it?’ (p.59). Eventually she decides she
must try to resist tradition: ‘I realised that this was just a made-up rule, and something inside of
me snapped. ‘I don’t want to follow this custom.’’ (p.59). She begins to rebel against the
outmoded customs that literally hold her prisoner. Significantly, Leela does not conceive of
herself solely as an individual, but rather sees herself as connected with a societal whole once
she begins to understand her position as part of the larger condition of child widows, widows in
general, and ultimately women’s roles in Indian society. As she becomes familiar with Gandhi’s
progressive, modern views on women’s changing roles in India, Leela begins to recognise as
unjust traditional social and religious requirements that illogically dictate women’s behaviour;
she rails against her family, dissatisfied with their flimsy insistence that this is simply the way
things have always been. While Leela initially believes her social position is nonnegotiable due
to her fate or kismet and the ferocious strength of society versus her own apparent impotence, she
later comes to understand that her actions can make a difference in changing her life. In reading
the newspaper daily, as well as undertaking other reading for her schoolwork, she becomes
familiar with the philosophical values and protest work of activists, including Gandhi, who are
leading the struggle to emancipate women in India—as well as India itself. In turn, Leela then
recognises that her individual actions can affect her entire society. With the help of others such
as her teacher and her brother, Leela not only acts with agency to fulfill her goals, she also
realizes that she can contribute to modernizing Indian society. In Keeping Corner, the conflation
of national progress and gender equality is clearly demonstrated as Gandhi’s pursuit of freedom
from colonial control is consistently shown to inspire Leela’s own pursuit of freedom from
patriarchal constraints. She frequently uses his principles and arguments to support her own: for
example, she confronts her father by saying, ‘Gandhiji thinks widows should be able to go to
school . . . . What good are all [his] ideas if widows and their families don’t take the lead? Ba, I
want to study, and I need your help’ (p.236). Eventually, her father recognizes that ‘this is not
just about Leela, it is also about something bigger’ (p.246-7) and assents. The new Indian girl as
a collective is about something bigger: changing social roles for Indian females, roles that
ultimately serve a national agenda. Thus, in their own small ways, Leela and other fictional new
Indian girl characters create a ripple effect that conceptually expands the boundaries not only of
girlhood but also of what comprises the Indian nation.

In Radha Padmnabhan’s Suchitra and the Ragpicker, the new Indian girl, is portrayed as a heroic
saviour. In Suchitra and the Ragpicker the rescue motif comprises the central narrative. It is
about Suchitra, a middle-class girl who makes up her mind to rescue ‘a dirty ragpicker’ from her
present-day suburb of New Delhi when she glances out her window to see the girl sifting through
the garbage ‘with poetry in her movement and a spring in her step’ (p.9). Kupi, the ragpicker
girl, is described with the baffling combination of being ‘so ragged and so dirty’ and yet ‘so
cheerful’ (p.11). Suchitra demands of her mother ‘one good reason why she should not go to
school like me’ and becomes compelled to help the girl even though ‘she hadn’t the faintest idea
what she was going to do’(p.13). Suchitra begins to gain an understanding of the complexity of
Kupi’s situation when her teacher explains that ‘[i]n a country like ours, many parents are so
poor that they send their children to work’ (p.18). She welcomes her teacher’s suggestion to find
a way to send Kupi to school. Kupi is both an orphan and a virtual slave to a local man who
forces her to collect garbage and keeps the money she earns. It seems impossible for Kupi to
become educated and begin the journey towards a better life. As she strives to enact change,
Suchitra encounters significant resistance from family and friends. Her friends initially wonder at
her beliefs: ‘You sure have funny ideas, Suchi. I have often seen children rummage in these bins,
too, but never really paid them any attention’ (p.11), and her mother warns her not to ‘get
agitated’ or to ‘think of’ Kupi (p.13). Later, though, her parents accept Suchitra’s determination
to help Kupi, and they begrudgingly support her: her mother both ‘admire[s] Suchitra’ and
‘wonder[s] why Suchitra couldn’t behave like an ordinary little girl’ (p.31). Clearly, the new
Indian girl in her transformative mode is a novelty, but also ultimately admirable: when
Suchitra’s father later reluctantly admits that he is ‘proud of her,’her mother concurs (p.33). Her
final hurdel comes in the form of the man who controls Kupi, whom she later learns kidnapped
Kupi (and other children) in infancy. While she is unable to convert his belief system, Suchitra
manages to overcome him, too, by enlisting the help of her friends and the police. Once Kupi and
the other children are safe—saved—Suchitra’s parents and teacher decide she ‘deserves a
reward’ for helping Kupi, and Suchitra uses the opportunity to attempt to do something of the
utmost importance to most new Indian girls: deepen her interrelationships. Suchitra wishes her
family would ‘adopt Kupi and give me a sister’ (p.61). Instead, her teacher adopts the girl. This
adult authority figure will attempt to find Kupi’s parents, but if she cannot, she intends to raise
Kupi and take responsibility for her education. Thus, the outcome Suchitra had initially hoped
for, that Kupi would be able to attend school, is circuitously achieved by the novel’s resolution,
and as a bonus a beggar master has been brought down, numerous children have been freed from
his bondage, and they have the chance to be reunited with their families.

In contrast to Radha Padmnabhan’s Suchitra and the Ragpicker, where an upper class girl offers
a helping hand to empower a lower class girl of the society, Mrinal Pande’s Daughter’s
Daughter, offers a child’s perspective to the biases of a middle class upper caste family to
women and female children. The book portrays the narrator, Tinu as a girl growing up in a
middle class, upper caste family, which is constantly on move. Daughter’s Daughter is a unique
novel that explores the childhood of girls. The novel presents the story of girls who are
unattended and ignored by adults. But the narrative is constructed in such a way that the attention
is always on the girls. The identity of the girls is acknowledged in relation to the parents or the
other relatives. The girls are very often labelled as ‘daughter’s daughters’ at their maternal
grandmother’s house, signifying the inferior position of their mother; and daughters carry the
same inferiority in a more visible way. The Daughter’s Daughter is a faithful rendering into thin
fiction of the upbringing of girls in India, and also provides a critique of the formation of their
identity in such surroundings. This novel gives us glimpses of the instances in the life of a
growing girl who was regarded inferior because of her birth as a girl. Tinu gets enough
opportunities to observe and experience the condition of being a daughter’s daughter during her
visits to her grandmother’s house in Almora and her uncle’s house in Gorakhpur. The shifting of
her grandmother’s family from Almora to Gorakhpur in the winter months made Tinu’s mother
and the other children move to their house where she learns to give up their “treasure in this
house to the son’s children”(32). Being a daughter’s daughter, Tinu’s position in her uncle’s
house is below to all the other family members. Her uncle’s son Anu is given preference and
nobody says no to him and always acts according to his wishes. Even the boy too knows at an
early age that he is the preferred one in comparison with the girls. In Pande’s Daughter’s
Daughter Anu remarks “You sit there. You are Daughter’s children! We’ll sleep here near
Grandmother”(31). Tinu and her sister had no way but to do as directed because they know they
are daughter’s daughters and have no right to say or act anything against the son’s children.

Tinu’s mother expects her and her sister to behave in the way all girls should. There are some
behavioural patterns for girls. Once the children Dinu and Tinu were denied the prasad of Ishta.
The reason was that “it was not to be had by the daughter’s daughters” (71-72) . Hira di slaps her
daughter. Though grandmother disagrees with it she still assumes that “marriageable daughters
need to be tamed”(72). Both Hira di and Grandmother call their husband Malik- the master. Here
the narrator so well knows that they are being tamed for their masters. They believe that it is the
duty of the mother to train her to become the best daughter in lawlest she may spoil the family
name. The only aim for the daughter seems to be marriage. When Tinu’s mother made Tinu and
Dinu do their homework their aunts feel it awkward and silly. Grandmother too was worried
about being bookish as she believes that it may affect their eyes and they may need glasses in
future. She also adds how difficult it is to marry off those with glasses. The day her mother gave
birth to a son is so auspicious for them. Dinu and Tinu were on their way from the school when
they heard the News. Tinu remembers the gloomy faces in her family during the birth of her little
sister and she immediately juxtaposes the festive mood of her brother’s birth with the gloominess
of her sister’s birth. Everyone becomes so happy on the birth of her brother. Mother’s face
radiates with joy and the aunts bring a special broth for her. When she was reluctant to drink it
grandmother compels her. “Drink it up , drink it all up... You will be breast feeding a son this
time”(85). Their younger sister too got attention. Grandmother declared she is their “Laxmi
daughter”(85) who brought a brother on her back, to protect and take care of his sisters and the
family, who is to carry the family name.

Towards the end the work reveals how Tinu learns to behave against the expected ways. She
realises the difficulty of being a girl and a child. “To be small is to live on caste-offs. Nothing
that you wish to share will fit anyone else”(114). Now Tinu changes herself. The fights between
her parents scare her. But she doesn’t want to be in a confused state, she doesn’t want to be in
something which she doesn’t like. Of course she feels lonely and scared. But she doesn’t want
others to see her crying. She covers her face. She doesn’t want to be weak like her sister. Tinu
feels pathetic thinking about her sister who couldn’t do anything in a situation of agony,
suppression and confusion. “I wish she’d rage, shout, and fight. But I know she won’t” (115).

The critical review of the three novels shows the girls of India through the lens of their culture in
many ways. They are nurturing and fierce, powerful and fragile, troubled and triumphant as they
each seek their own path.

Works cited

Jafa, Manorama. "Women in Children's Literature of India." Writer and Illustrator 14.2 (Jan.-
March 1995): 1-5. Survey of characters starting with Panchatantra.
Kirpal, Viney. The Girl Child in 20thCentury Indian Literature. New Delhi: Sterling Publishers,
1992.

Pande, Mrinal. Daughter’s Daughter. New Delhi: Penguin, 1993.

Padmnabhan, Radha, and Viky Arya. Suchitra and the Ragpicker. Gurgaon: Scholastic India,
2000. Print.

Reshma., K. R. " “A Cellar Full of Sour Beer”: Girl Child in the House of Indian Fiction in
English with Special Reference to Mrinal Pande’s Daughter’s Daughter”. The Criterion 4.4
(2013): 1-6. Web.

Sheth, Kashmira. Keeping Corner. Princeton, N.J: Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic, 2009.
Sound recording.

Superle, Michelle. “Imagining the New Indian Girl: Representations of Girlhood in Keeping
Corner and Suchitra and the Ragpicker.” In Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature.
June 2010.